I just felt my first earthquake.

It just now showed up on the USGS page.

Looks like preliminarily a 5.4 on the Richter scale, with an epicenter 127 miles from here. I’m currently the farthest-away reporter.

I was about to climb in bed and the bed started shaking a little. I thought the neighbors were shaking the room. Then I realized everything in the room was shaking, and I was shaking, and the curtain rods were swaying back and forth as I went over to the window to look outside. I’d say it lasted about 6 seconds. It was ending when I finally realized that it was an earthquake, since I’d never felt one. I wonder if I’d have noticed if I weren’t on the 5th floor.

As I realized what it was, I got scared. The fifth floor seemed like a bad place to be. No one else seemed to be leaving their rooms, presumably they were all sleeping. I was in my boxers without shoes. I put on some pants and shoes and walked down the hall. At this point, I wondered if I should bother. I didn’t want to go outside, and I started to wonder if I was just imagining things. If I were going to evacuate, it would be dumb to do it in the elevator, and I didn’t feel like walking down stairs. And then I thought about Joanna’s stories of everyone standing around outside in Athens after an earthquake. It was 4:40 am at this point, and I didn’t want to go stand around outside.

So I got on the internet and tried to find it. I first started with Google news. Because, you know, someone was going to write a news story about an earthquake within 5 minutes of it happening, and Google news was clearly going to tell me about it. Yeah. Then I found some promising websites with real time updates, but I didn’t see anything in my area. I figured it must have been something else, after all, the only earth quakes I’ve been in before I’ve slept through. I decided to report it on the website anyway, as the USGS seemed very interested in my report. After I finished filling out the report, the website listed the quake.

Anyway, with that shot of adrenaline, I’m going to try to sleep now.